This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1971.

Based on a section of the author's thesis, University of London.

From workers' wages to presidential elections, labor unions once exerted tremendous clout in American life. In the immediate post-World War II era, one in three workers belonged to a union. The fraction now is close to one in five, and just one in ten in the private sector. The only thing big about Big Labor today is the scope of its problems. While many studies have explained the causes of this decline, What Unions No Longer Do shows the broad repercussions of labor's collapse for the American economy and polity. Organized labor was not just a minor player during the middle decades of the twentieth century, Jake Rosenfeld asserts. For generations it was the core institution fighting for economic and political equality in the United States. Unions leveraged their bargaining power to deliver benefits to workers while shaping cultural understandings of fairness in the workplace. What Unions No Longer Do details the consequences of labor's decline, including poorer working conditions, less economic assimilation for immigrants, and wage stagnation among African-Americans. In short, unions are no longer instrumental in combating inequality in our economy and our politics, resulting in a sharp decline in the prospects of American workers and their families.

In the early 1880s a disastrous plant disease diminished the yields of the hitherto flourishing coffee plantation of Ceylon. Coincidentally, world market conditions for coffee were becoming increasingly unfavourable. The combination of these factors brought a swift end to coffee cultivation in the British crown colony and pushed the island into a severe economic crisis. When Ceylon re-emerged from this crisis only a decade later, its economy had been thoroughly transformed and now rested on the large-scale cultivation of tea. This book uses the unprecedented intensity and swiftness of this process to highlight the socioeconomic interconnections and dependencies in tropical export economies in the late nineteenth century and it shows how dramatically Ceylonese society was affected by the economic transformation.

Nobodies to Somebodies examines the origins and growth of the bourgeoisie in Sri Lanka during British rule - an important but neglected aspect of the country's modern history. It traces its evolution from a 'feudal' society and mercantilist economy, to the age of plantations. In the course of this evolution local merchants accumulated capital through arrack and toll renting, subsequently diversifying into plantation cultivation and graphite mining, thereby making dents in the old caste-based division of labour.This study assigns primacy to class over caste, and details the rise of the new-rich 'Nobodies' of many different castes, ethnicities and religions into the ranks of the 'Somebodies'. It discusses the links between capital accumulation, religious revivalism, ethnic identity and political movements, and the marriage 'cartels' which led to further concentration of wealth.The book focuses on the rentier nature of the bourgeoisie and how they adopted Western culture and lifestyles and were basically collaborative with the colonial rulers. It highlights the constraints on further capitalist development, the obsession of the bourgeoisie with land acquisition and social status, and its consciousness as a class, especially on issues of political reform.

Part I: Historiography Writing Global Labour History c. 1800-1940: A Historiography of Concepts, Periods, and Geographical Scope 39 Jan Lucassen African Labor History 91 Frederick Cooper Reflections on Labor and Working-Class History in the Middle East and North Africa 117 Zachary Lockman Paradigms in the Historical Approach to Labour Studies on South Asia 147 Sabyasachi Bhattacharya The History of Labor in Japan in the Twentieth Century: Cycles of Activism and Acceptance 161 Akira Suzuki Fin-de-Si6cle Labour History in Canada and the United States: A Case for Tradition 195 Bryan D. Palmer Labour in Western Europe from c. 1800 227 Dick Geary The Laboring and Middle-Class Peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean: Historical Trajectories and New Research Directions 289 John D. French What's in a Name? Labouring Antipodean History in Oceania 335 Lucy Taksa Workers, Class, and the Socialist Revolution in Modern China 373 Arif Dirlik The Drama of the Russian Working Class and New Perspectives for Labour History in Russia 397 Andrei Sokolov Part 2: Case Studies in Comparative Labour History Worldwide Agricultural Labor and Property: A Global and Comparative Perspective 455 Prasannan Parthasarathi Studying Asian Domestic Labour Within Global Processes: Comparisons and Connections 479 Ratna Saptari Brickmakers in Western Europe (17oo00-19oo) and Northern India (1800-2000): Some Comparisons 513 Jan Lucassen Global Labour History in the Twenty-First Century: Coal Mining and Its Recent Pasts 573 Ian Phimister "Nothing to Lose but a Harsh and Miserable Life Here on Earth": Dock Work as a Global Occupation, 1790-1970 591 Lex Heerma van Voss Railroad Labor and the Global Economy: Historical Patterns 623 Shelton Stromquist.